The Fire

For a long while, I have pointed to a Beckett quote from Krapp's Last Tape as my favorite: "Perhaps my best years are gone. But I wouldn't want them back, not with the fire that's in me now." First seen so magically on that hostel wall in Kilkenney the day after St. Paddy's 2000...

So it is with some surprise that I find one to rival it in my imagination, referenced in the pages of a Robert Ludlum novel as I while away an uneventful Tuesday evening. Yet here it is:

A poet (Jean Cocteau) was once asked, 'If his house were on fire, what favorite object would he save?' And Cocteau said, 'I would save the fire. Without fire, nothing is possible.'

Truly, an excellent response.